Consumers are increasingly using automated mechanisms to perform every day transactions. Kiosks exist to avoid enterprise personnel and lines. These automated kiosks allow consumers to perform transactions with an enterprise or agency with little to no human intervention. Individuals also perform transactions online and are capable of using their smart phones to check out of stores.
In addition, technology has allowed individuals to engage in a variety of social-networking activities. These activities support collaborative actions amongst the users of social-networking sites. For example, social-networking users organize flash dance mobs for purposes of having members show up at a physical location and perform a dance at a designated date and time. More recently, social-networking sites have been used for more nefarious purposes, such as organizing a mob to rob or loot a particular store at a particular date and time.
Most smart phones support instant access to social-networking sites, such that individuals can provide up to the minute details about themselves or others that they are observing and collaborate in real time with one another.
Yet, one area where collaboration has not yet advanced is in the area of shopping transactions. Typical, online transactions are aligned to a specific individual based on an identifier for that individual. A single user has a single shopping cart associated with that user for an online transaction. So, the traditional online shopping experience prevents people in a same household or in other mutual beneficial relationships from collaboratively shopping with one another. The same drawback with online shopping exists during a physical shopping experience; for example, a physical transaction is not tied to other online activities; the physical transaction is an independent isolated event with a customer.